Question

I need to expand the home folder inside .bashrc as in the following example:

HOME=~
export ANT_OPTS=-Dant.logger.defaults=$HOME/environment/AnsiColorLogger.override

Is there a shortcut to do it in one line without the throw-away HOME variable?

Answer 1

HOME is already a built-in variable in bash; in fact, its value is what ~ expands to.

From the bash man page:

HOME

The home directory of the current user; the default argument
for the cd builtin command. The value of this variable is also used
when performing tilde expansion.